The number of threads which are related to permisisions problems, and my own woes, lead me to believe that there may be a better way.

I would suggest that users be given the option of installing squeezecenter to run under their own uid:gid rather than squeezecenter.

The virtue of running squeezecenter as the user who owns the music is that, if the user can access the stuff, so can squeezecenter. When the user installs plugins, she can do it as herself, not as root (assuming Plugins is owned by the user) and so will get all those permissions and ownerships right.

What is the advantage of adding the squeezecenter uid and running as squeezecenter?

peterw

2008-04-02, 18:01

What is the advantage of adding the squeezecenter uid and running as squeezecenter?

It's a basic server security approach -- limiting potential harm. The advantage is that you have far less to lose if there are any bugs in SqueezeCenter or any third-party plugins you install (especially if you only grant the SC7 user write privileges over the preference, cache, and playlist directories).

If SC7 ran as your account and there were bugs, you'd stand to lose your music, all your personal documents,... Worse yet would be running as the 'root' admin user -- any bug could potentially delete everything on your computer.

SuperQ

2008-04-03, 17:36

This isn't a difficult thing to fix. The scanner should simply warn the user if it hits problem, create a fix script, and include some simple "do this to run this fix script" instructions.